PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of Books...tilt several degrees away from the ordinary, riffing on the fantastic, the macabre, and the grim ... Three tales in the collection feature linked characters... Most of the tales in Stone Mattress feature older characters whose predicaments are set against flashbacks to their youth and the now-quaint social norms of the 1960s and ‘70s ... Stone Mattress reveals Margaret Atwood at her most deliciously wicked and inventive. While these tales tend toward darker shadings of human experience, their subtexts are often playful, leavened by the author’s masterful wordplay.
Gail Godwin
PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksGodwin engagingly traces the gradual accommodations that transpire between a no-nonsense woman who hints at the 'ruin' of her own life and who prefers her solitude, and an unusually intelligent, inquisitive, resourceful 11-year-old who skipped sixth grade ... Grief Cottage is an absorbing and wise novel. Gail Godwin convincingly expands the meanings of haunting well beyond the appearance of the ghost-boy who triggers Marcus Harshaw’s uncanny — and canny — journey of self-discovery.
